It is commonplace for companies to impose policies intended to protect sensitive data. For example, a company may impose a policy that prohibits employees from leaving its premises with laptop computers containing confidential customer credit card information. Such a policy attempts to eliminate the possibility of someone stealing an employee's laptop computer and obtaining access to the confidential customer credit card information from the stolen laptop computer.
One conventional approach to preventing an employee from inadvertently transferring an electronic document containing customer credit card information to a laptop computer is for the company to impose a policy requiring the employee to read through each electronic document prior to storing that electronic document on the laptop computer. Unfortunately, even if mandated, such a policy is difficult to enforce and is extremely burdensome on the employee.
To assist the employee, a conventional tool exists which is designed to scan an electronic document for data having a particular format. For example, to determine whether a document contains customer credit card information, the conventional tool scans the document for a string of characters having the format “####-####-####-####” where # is a character of the set {0, 1, 2, 3,4,5,6,7,8,9}.